Michigan Senate candidate Gary Peters wants voters — and elected officials — to know one thing: you can’t talk about climate change without talking about jobs.

“I think from an economic development standpoint it actually presents some great opportunities for us in Michigan with job creation, and moving toward sustainable energy and renewable energy,” Peters said. “So when I talk about climate change in Michigan, it’s intertwined with my economic message and my job creation message.”

Back in 2009, the Heritage Foundation assessed the economic impacts of the cap and trade legislation that Gary Peters supports, even assuming an aggressive tax credit and government incentive scheme, and found as follows:

The typical cap-and-trade proposal seeks to reduce CO2 emissions by 60 percent to 80 percent by 2050 where the comparison year is usually 2005. The Center for Data Analysis at The Heritage Foundation did an analysis of the costs of meeting the goals of the Lieberman-Warner bill, S. 2191, last spring. The report on this analysis is attached.[1]

Our analytical models are not suited to making projections beyond 2030. Nevertheless, the economic impacts of this cap-and-trade program in just the first two decades were extraordinary. The estimated aggregate losses to Gross Domestic Product (GDP), adjusted for inflation, are $4.8 trillion. By 2029 the job losses in the manufacturing sector will be nearly 3 million. This is over and above the nearly one million manufacturing job losses that most economists predict will occur even in the absence of global-warming legislation.

The manufacturing job losses are shown in an attached chart taken from a study of an EPA mandated 70 percent cut in CO2.[2] Also attached is a map showing the relative importance of manufacturing to a state’s economy.

You will never guess what that map shows, unless you guessed that manufacturing is really freaking important to Michigan’s economy, in which case you you already have guessed it.

Cap and trade proponents like to claim that current manufacturing processes are not “sustainable” and are ultimately doomed to failure in the end. Whether or not that is true is up for debate; what is not up for debate is that the jobs they wish to theoretically create with massive taxpayer subsidies (collected from an ever-shrinking economy, thanks to the cap-and-trade policies they support) are without a doubt not sustainable. These short term band-aids will inevitably lead to catastrophic job loss and Michigan will be one of the states hardest hit.

If Gary Peters is determined to get elected on a platform of costing his own state jobs, he ought to at least be honest enough to say so.